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Abstract

In their article reporting the results of two experiments, Thorstenson, Pazda, & Elliot (2015a) found evidence that perception of colors on the blue-yellow axis was impaired if the participants had watched a sad movie clip, relative to participants who watched clips designed to induce a happy or neutral mood. Subsequently, these authors retracted their article (Thorstenson, Pazda, & Elliot, 2015b), citing a mistake in their statistical analyses and a problem with the data in one of their experiments. Here, we discuss a number of other methodological problems with Thorstenson et al.’s experimental design, and also demonstrate that the problems with the data go beyond what these authors reported. We conclude that repeating, with minor revision, one of the two experiments, as Thorstenson et al. (2015b) proposed, will not be sufficient to address the problems with this work.

Funding

1

Nice work, guys! I also raised the point about chromatic adaptation from the film clip when we discussed this in a recent workshop. The distributions of data from Experiment 2 are indeed very odd. Have the original authors given any feedback on this?

Some constructive feedback for future experiments: I like the idea of using musical mood inducers. Then the title could be "Seeing the Blues: Does Music-Induced Sadness Affect Color Perception?"

0

I'm no expert at this, but I'm not seeing how a point of reference e.g a white background makes it statistically more valid and reliable. I think the focus on Thorstenson et al paper is not psychophysics aka seeing fast, seeing slow (double barrelled physiological assertions that don't make it to cognition-decision level). But on mood. In this instance, I think there needs to be more qualitative parameters. Like mapping "visual heuristics" to mood using Likert scales, algorithms, priors etc. I don't see how watching lots of clips, different stimuli improves experimental design. That might help at the eyeball level for monitioring physiology responses, but watching the Lion King over and over again... you can't be serious. Why not just represent Simba, Pumba, Nala like blobs and beep beep beep circle green and red dots and measure how sick and tired aka angry participants get.

We meant a different clip for each participant, but anyway as we say later, better to avoid the whole issue by using auditory recordings rather than videos to induce mood. We expect that the white background would reduce trial-to-trial variability.

Different clip for each participant would lead to misclassification bias. I wasn't aware colors can be heard like Pocahontas unless synaesthesia etc. If they can replicate results backed by raw data, then you + colleagues could analyze, affirm or not for perceptual studies. I see more misunderstandings and a lack of interdisciplinary interpretations rather than statistical soundness.

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